MOSCOW — The Soviet Union`s national library and a famous 18th-century mansion are sinking in the ground in a construction scandal that diplomats say gladdens Moscow`s new party chief.

A stone`s throw from the Kremlin, the historic Pashkov House and the Lenin Library are cracking and sinking in the ground due to a just-completed and ill-planned subway line, published reports said.

In a rare show of public anger, Soviet journalists, architects and historians have called for an investigation.

Cracks - one that runs the entire height of the 19-story-tall storage wing - have appeared in the austerely classical 1930s Lenin Library, the nation`s largest.

Next door, ``a portion of the 18th-century Pashkov House has broken away from the main building,`` a State Construction Committee report said. The north wing of the elegant mansion, also known as the Old Lenin Library, has been braced with steel supports.

Although construction scandals are nothing new in the Soviet Union, they rarely involve buildings as prestigious as the national library or the Pashkov estate, built in 1784 for an aristocrat.

After the Russian Revolution in 1917 it was appropriated by the state and has been used for library purposes since.

``The old crowd will be blamed,`` a Western diplomat said.

``Although no one wants to see the Pashkov House go, I`m sure this makes Boris Yeltsin (the new Moscow Communist Party boss) and the new crew happy,`` the diplomat said.

Another Western diplomat and cultural expert agreed. ``He will now be able to point at two national monuments sinking and crumbling and use this to clean out the old city `machine.```

The former administration approved the subway construction under the two buildings ``without taking protective measures,`` according to a city historical and cultural department document quoted in the weekly newspaper article that broke the story.